About six months ago I reviewed the Helix Stadium XL and came away cautiously optimistic. Great hardware, better amps, and a pile of missing features and first-gen bugs. Since then I’ve actually gigged the thing. Christmas shows, Sunday services most weeks, a couple of conference events, somewhere north of 30 shows all up. So this is the honest catch-up, and it starts with the time it nearly gave me a heart attack mid-song.
The guitar world has spent the last few years treating capture tech like a holy war. One camp wants modelling. One camp wants captures. One camp wants to shout AI a few more times and hope that somehow counts as innovation. It is all getting a bit silly. That is why Helix Stadium has my attention right now. Not because Proxy is already out in the wild and flattening everything in its path. It is not. As of March 7, 2026, the latest public Helix Stadium firmware notes Line 6 has posted are still 1.2.1, and Proxy is still preview territory. The Stadium Floor itself only started shipping in mid-February, so plenty of people are still in the honeymoon phase with the hardware before any of the capture stuff even enters the picture. But the strategy around Proxy looks smarter than the usual race to see who can scream capture the loudest.
I owned the original Helix Floor and loved it. That thing could conjure tones that made my ears happy. The amp models were solid, the effects library was extensive, and the workflow made sense once you wrapped your head around it. But there was always this nagging limitation that drove me absolutely nuts: DSP. The Helix Floor is incredibly DSP limited, and if you’re someone like me who loves pitch effects, you learned to compromise pretty quickly.
I’ve been using automatic guitar tuners for years now. The concept is simple: you place the device on a tuning peg, pluck the string, and the motorised tuner detects the pitch through vibration and rotates the peg until you’re in tune. No pedals, no cables, no staring at a screen while you turn the peg yourself. It should be the fastest way to tune a guitar, especially when you’re constantly switching between tunings.